Welcome back to another episode of Small Ball with Kenny Beach. I'm going to say this right now. I'm filming this July 3rd, around 10 o'clock central time. So when you listen to this, maybe some big old trade has happened. Maybe another big free agency deal has happened. And if that is the case, don't worry, you can still listen to this show. And if there is more stuff dropping, go over to the Kenny Freel YouTube channel because I'll probably cover it there as well. I'm really excited for today's episode, man. There are a lot of teams doing some cool things. Has not been the craziest of free agencies, I'll say that. I think yesterday we got like one signing and then one coach being decided. So it's not, you know, it's already dying down two days in. But there are teams being really aggressive.

And in today's episode, I kind of want to go over teams that switch tears.

Went from a playing team to a real playoff team.

Went from a team to a contender.

Maybe went the opposite direction.

From a contender to are they even going to make the playoffs?

A lot of things, again, are changing to shaping things up.

For example, this morning I woke up and saw that the Doran Finney Smith signing for the Houston Rockets may turn into a sign and trade, which means that the Lakers may get something.

So again, all of this is very, very fluid in between this show, numbers on the board,

and the Kenny Friel channel, hopefully I'm doing a decent job of covering all things free agency. Summer League is just in a couple days. We got like the, is it California Summer League? The Utah Summer League starts this weekend. And of course, Vegas starts a little bit after that. One of my first years in a long time where I won't be in Vegas for Summer League, so I'm a little upset about that. My upset is the wrong word. It's become like a routine to get ready in July to take that flight and have some fun in Vegas. But this time around, things are different. Life is changing, and I won't really have the time. Oh, and at the end of the episode, we'll kind of go back. I know I mentioned to y'all that every single offseason, I take some time to kind of go over the content that I produced for the previous season. And I want to talk about some of the goals that I have going into next season and how I'm going to try to achieve those goals. Leave a like on the episode, subscribe to the channel, go listen to and watch TEPA, and Drisa, numbers on the board.

Let's get into it.

Teams that have changed tiers, starting off with the Houston Rockets.

Now, some of these are going to be blainly obvious, right?

If you go on and add Kevin Durant, you go on and add Dorian Finney Smith to be what, your seventh most important person. You go on to bring back Clint Capella to be your 10th or 11th best person. Like this is a very

obvious that they shift the tears, but I think it's still worth talking about because I think that

this was a team last year that over the last couple years have built an identity, right?

This is a defensive-oriented team, whether it be Dylan Brooks or Fraybin-Vleet, signing out of free agency a few years back to kind of take this Rockets team that has been basically four to five years in the lottery, drafting pretty high. And for them to come in and kind of change some things. Obviously, EMA Udoca gets a ton of credit for that as well. they built this identity as a defensive-oriented team.

Last year, they went to the postseason as the second best team as the second best team. They were the second seed, though. You know, those things are not the same. It's not synonymous if you had a two-seed and second-best team, but they ended up being the two-seat in the playoffs and, you know, while majority of people pick the Warriors to

win me, include it, even though I was real skeptical. They took the Warriors to seven, right,

as this young up-and-coming team, but it was very, very obvious that they were missing one of the

guys that you can give the ball to late games and create. The offense was really iffy.

The only silver lining to their

...